I’m currently considering buying an Apple MacBook Pro 17″.
Why?
My Dell laptop is functional, but it isn’t that comfortable for watching DVDs etc., and I was really impressed by some of the stuff Donncha was doing on his last time I met him.
I still thing they are seriously overpriced, but I have my eye on one of these:
The problem is that the Apple webstore offers me very confusing options when I try to buy online (I’m still fantasy shopping, but you get the gist).
Display (monitor)
There’s glossy vs. matt.
According to the site:
Choose the glossy widescreen display to make your graphics, photos, and videos appear with richer colors and deeper blacks – great for watching DVD movies.
That sounds fine, but does that mean that DVDs will look awful on a matt display?
It’s not terribly clear.
Apple Software Solutions
It comes with OSX, but does that give you a fully functional laptop or do you need to get extras like iWork? Would a copy of Open Office do the trick?
Airline Power Adapter
Sounds like a nice idea, but which planes / airlines offer this kind of service?
AppleCare Protection Plan (APP)
This is where I got completely confused.
The AppleCare Protection Plan extends your computer’s 90 days of complimentary support and one-year warranty to up to three years of world-class support.
Do I need this? Is it really necessary? Are Macs more likely than PCs to explode?
At EUR449 ex-VAT it strikes me as really expensive.
Daithí says
It’s fine, in my experience. But the gloss is more TV-like, I think.
iWork (Pages, Keynote) is great, although if you’re in a very MS-environment, there are occasional hiccups. For basic stuff, TextEdit is surprisingly powerful. Spreadsheets is a big blind spot (for now). OpenOffice has two versions, one using the X11 library and one Java-related (NeoOffice); neither are ideal. MS Office 2004 is also available and I tend to use a mixture of it and iWork.
Never been on a European one that does.
Meh. Never had a serious issue. And I doubt the support is ‘world-class’.
michele says
Daithi
Do you’d basically recommend I get a copy of Office to go with it if I need spreadsheets and presentations?
Michele
PS: “world-class” may need to be redefined by some people 🙂
Daithí says
For presentations, I think that Keynote is ten times better than PowerPoint – and it’s pretty good at import and export. In particular, if you normally give presentations from your own laptop, Keynote is unquestionably for you 🙂
For spreadsheets, though, there seems to be no option (given the amount of .xls out there) than to use Excel. And that means getting Office. I don’t even think there’s a read-only jobbie out there any more. There are standalones (shareware etc) but serious spreadsheet users tend not to be big Mac users, or something.
However, Office 2004 is not an Intel binary, and Office 2008 is expected later this year, so it may also be better to wait for that?
michele says
A lot of the presentations that I would give I’d give on my own laptop. There are times when I need to work off someone else’s laptop, but I prefer to use my own where possible.
I don’t do crazy things with spreadsheets, so I could probably get away with using open office.
Waiting for the next release of Office on the mac probably makes sense 🙂
Michele
Robert Synnott says
The screen thing is just personal preference; apparently, some people where quite unhappy when Apple switched to the nicer-looking but allegedly less functional matt displays. (They’re by no means the first company to do so; high-end Dells have had them for a while, for instance).
As far as Office stuff goes, these days I mostly get by on Google Docs and Spreadsheet. OpenOffice is okay, but because it’s X11 it has very poor UI integration.
Don’t know about the airline thing, though as far as I know it’s very much a feature of new planes, so most airlines probably aren’t going to support it; they generally have quite old fleets.
AppleCare: I wouldn’t think you really need this.
By the way, why the 17″ laptop? Have you actually seen one in a shop or anything? They’re VERY big; you might be better off with the 15″ or even the 13″ Macbook.
Francesco says
Airlines are increasingly making laptop plugs available on the new bigger planes (like B777 or A380)… if you fly business class of course 😉
The good thing with Macs is that they seem to have quite a good battery, so I’d rather invest my money in an extra battery than in a airplane plug adapter 😉
As for OOo, its support on Mac is currently quite limited… to say the least. Currently you need to install X11 to run openoffice on a mac. A native version is currently being worked on (http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/download/aqua.html) but there are still quite a few big limitations.
Cormac says
Yup, 17″ is massive. All the Macbooks received updates recently. They each come with a min 1GB of RAM. The lowest spec Macbook would be fine for your needs IMO. Leopard is due out in October too, so it might be a consideration to wait a while.
michele says
Hmmm
I just liked the idea of a decent sized monitor 🙂
Francesco – I take it you fly business class then? 🙂
So OpenOffice doesn’t work too well on Macs? That’s a real pity, as I would need to have some way of opening Office documents, as I get a lot of them.
Are there any other major software “gotchas” that I should be aware of?
Michele
Cormac says
I haven’t had a single problem with OO on Mac as yet, but I’m not a big user of it either.
iTunes is the only real media player on Mac. So if you don’t like iTunes, well TS. And of course Internet Explorer isn’t available either 🙂
Robert Synnott says
Well, IE5.5 (NOT the same as IE5.5 for Windows; different rendering engine) is available, if you must.
If you want to play games, you’re probably out of luck. Also, no VHDL/Verilog tools or synthesisers (almost certainly not a problem 🙂 ). Those are the only two software gaps I can think of offhand.
You can, of course, plug in an external monitor. If you actually want the computer to be portable, don’t get the 17″ one. In fact, the only convincing reasons not to get a Macbook (13″) are screen size and fast graphics requirement.
Francesco says
Mmm… not with our current company policies (at least not until I become an executive :D)… But I have done my checks on what each class offers when I was doing my bookings.
OOo on Mac does work, the only gotcha is that right now you need to install X11, which is quite an overhead.
Btw… did I mention you can also run linux on a Mac? 😀
Robert Synnott says
I wouldn’t have said Apple’s X11 was much of an overhead; it takes up about 20 megabytes of disk space, and when running (and you don’t have to run it all the time) requires minimal system resources except when actually in use. It certainly isn’t the fastest X11 server ’round, granted, but it’s not going to kill your system’s performance.
OpenOffice for X11 is bloody ugly, though.
Stewart Curry says
I find my 17″ macbook (much as I love it) unbearably hot after it’s been running for a few hours – you could probably burn yourself off the space above the F keys, and the underside could fry an egg.
michele says
@Robert – I don’t have any requirement for IE 🙂
I’m not much of a gamer, so that won’t upset me too much
@Francesco – I always fly as cheaply as possible 🙂
@Stewart – sounds like bad ventilation
Paul McCarthy says
Hi Michele,
I got my mac a couple of months ago. I went with the 13 inch white macbook, and I’m very happy with it. I bought mine before Apple upgraded their lineup, so mine came with 512MB RAM, which I recently upgraded to 2GB.
On the software side of things, I’ve installed the usual suspects: Firefox, Thunderbird & Skype.
I also installed OpenOffice, and I’d agree with everyone else, it’s not great on the mac. I’ve gone with Office 2004 for Mac, and it works fine.
For editing plain text files, I use Smultron as it allows you to open and edit multiple files at the same time.
Donncha O Caoimh says
Before you buy, my screen just started flickering. It’s not too bad and hopefully fixable but it’s annoying. I’m in the market to buy another laptop now, but it’ll probably be a Dell, or really anything that’ll run Linux.
I don’t care about Windows.
michele says
Paul – what do you use for more complex word processing etc?
Donncha – so you’re moving back to the dark side? 🙂
Paul McCarthy says
For complex word processing I use Word 2004 for Mac. I’ve tried using OpenOffice, but on the Mac it’s not great, whereas Office does seem to work much better.
When I originally bought my Mac I did my utmost to try as much open source software as I could, but unfortunately there’s not a huge choice out there. So I had to bite the bullet and install MS Office.
The best advice that I can give you is to sit down and make a list of what you’ll need to do on your Mac, and what your software requirements are. Then it’s just of case of googling for the relevant Mac versions of what you need.
Having said that, I’m delighted with mine, and I actually passed my slightly older Dell machine on to my parents to use because I was barely using it.
Niall Dunphy says
I’m arriving a bit late to the conversation, so my apologies if my comments are redundant. I’d agree with the comment about the Macbook vs Macbook Pro options – unless you want a desktop replacement or use graphically intensive apps a Macbook is just fine and will save you money – maybe buy a large screen and dual screen when at your desk.
I use a mixture of Ms Word 2004, Pages and Neooffice for my word processing and page layout tasks and to be honest I rarely if ever fire up Word. Pages is great for all sorts of page layout and NeoOffice writer is an excellent word processor both these apps are the bundled TextEdit reads/writes .doc files.
Keynote blows PowerPoint away in so many ways and can read/write ppt files if you need the added security of using the presetations on a windows machine. (don’t expect them to look as good)
Neooffice Calc is not bad at all, but not as good as Excel, which is possibily one of the best Microsoft products ever – however you can buy Excel 2004 seperately if its a must.
Applecare is a nice extra and maybe deserving of some thought for a laptop, as they get a harder time of it generally.
One last point with regards to the price – compare similaraly spec’d machines and you’ll be surprise Macs are in many cases less expenisve than Dells or other Wndows PCs.
michele says
Niall
All input is welcome 🙂
I’m still not convinced about the Applecare… I’d have thought that paying more than 1k for a device would give me some statutory rights
Michele
Mark says
Hi Michele,
I really wouldn’t worry about the apple care side of things – I’m using Macs for 15 years and never had a problem that wasn’t easily rectified. That doesn’t mean I’m the first phone call you make if you do have a problem!
Google spreadsheet is doing me just fine and I have come from an MS Office on Mac background. I have Open Office on my PC at work and still opt for Google. The other thing to bear in mind is that you can run Windows natively on the all Macs now so no doubt you will end using both along side each other. Chances are for the boring PC-centric stuff, spreadsheets and pie charts (cue ‘I’m a Mac, I’m a PC’ advert) you’ll end up reverting back to Windows, but, like I said, Google is doing the job for me. You can also upload any existing Excel file to Google and, in my case anyway, it has retained all calculations and formulas and you can also export back to an .xls file. On the size, I have found the 15″ more than adequate, the weight, IMO doesn’t really come into it – it’s not like you can stick the 15″ in your pocket and have the Lugg the 17″ around – the difference is a pound and half of butter. If you genuinely reckon you’ll be watching DVDs on it regularly then I’d go for the 17″, if there’s a chance you’ll be hooking it up externally and using it as a kind of Mac media centre then go smaller. Any of the Mac line up at the moment is more than capable of handling the requirements you’ve outlined.
Hope this helps.
PS If Apple rang me tomorrow and said ‘you’ve won a competition, pick what you want from our store’ – it’d be the 17″ Macbook Pro.
michele says
Mark
So a 15″ would be fine?
But what about the macbook vs macbook pro argument?
Michele
Mark says
From a practicality point of view I would go with the 15″. The 17″ I’m sure would be beautiful to watch a DVD on but you’re not going to browse the web on a phone when you’re sitting next to a computer – same thing in my eyes, laptop vs TV. If you’re presenting you’ll have access to a projector, if you don’t you’ll be sitting close enough to the person, if you’re watching a DVD it’ll probably be on a plane or train – 15″ at arms length – more than enough viewing area. If you’re in a car the 17″ is too wide to wedge between your arms and drive at the same time! (I’m picturing that – it looks funny, pause for laughter).
Macbook vs Pro – power, the Pro is a desktop Mac on wheels, you won’t need the power but it’s always nice to have it. If you opt for a Macbook you’re limiting your size to 13″. Having used a 15″ Pro for work – and I miss it dearly and owning a 13″ G4 iBook I would without a doubt go for the 15″, simply a much nicer machine.
My advice – go for the lower spec’d (2.2Ghz vs 2.4Ghz Intel core 2 duo) 15″ Pro and add a 160Gb 7200 drive or the 200Gb 4200 drive. There’s 2Gb ram in both, graphics cards are the same only 128 vs 256mb – 128’s more than enough IMO – €2109 vs €2399 inc. VAT.
michele says
Hmmm
I’m so tempted 🙂
There’s a couple of those available in the refurb secion on the Apple store!
Mark says
Well, you know what they say – ‘Once Mac, never back’.
Robert Synnott says
One serious reason to consider the 13″ model is that it is just more portable. Specs are similar, except for the graphics side of things; if you play games, you’ll need to get the Pro.
michele says
Robert
Is there that much of a difference between a 13″ and a 15″ in terms of size and weight?
I think my Dell is a 15″.. though I’d have to double check
Michele
Robert Synnott says
Well, my 12″ iBook fits handily in a backpack; I can’t imagine a 15″ laptop being at all as easy to carry round. It really depends on what degree of portability you need (and how you normally travel; if you use a car there’s probably no issue).
michele says
Robert
If I’m travelling for anything work related I’d normally be in a car or maybe in a plane….
Michele
Mark says
Worth bookmarking for future reference:
http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/
Mark.
Justin says
Just stumbled across this discussion as I am looking to purchase a laptop for downloading biggish files (33mb min) from a pro digital camera on site. Would I be better off with a MAC or PC? For tethered shooting with live view I’m told the Mac is a better bet. The files will then be adjusted in photoshop on a pc back at base for now, swapping over to a Mac later is an option to be considered when the time comes.
Justin.
Michele Neylon says
Justin
I love my Mac Book Pro, but if you’re only going to be using the laptop for transferring files it would probably be overkill to get a Mac when a standard PC laptop running Windows or even Linux would achieve the same result
Michele